29 February 2016

In a letter to his mother, written in 1919, T.S. Eliot, a native of the Midwest, might have been thinking of himself when he made this comment about the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev: "There are advantages in coming from a large flat country which no one wants to visit." Turgenev, who died in France in 1883, made the transit from east to west and, a century later, so did Andrei Makine.

By chance,
two of my favorite living Russian writers represent two different Russias.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is from Moscow, capitol city of European Russia
although residents of St. Petersburg would loudly contest that designation on
cultural grounds. Andrei Makine comes from central Siberia, part of
what is known as Asian Russia. Born in 1957, Makine. after several
early displacements, grew up in an orphanage. Although
his schooling was erratic, Makine's teachers recognized a brilliant
student. Bilingual since early childhood, Makine wrote his doctoral thesis
at the University of Moscow on contemporary French literature.

In 1987,
while taking part in a teacher exchange program with France, Makine asked for
and was granted political asylum. At first he led a clandestine
existence, taking shelter in the old Père Lachaise cemetery for a period he has
described as one of "permanent despair." He got his first job
as a professor of Russian at the Lycée Jacques-Decour and then wrote another
doctoral thesis - this one at the Sorbonne - on the Russian writer Ivan Bunin.
Makine, who has said "(S)tyle is more important. It's not the what,
it's the how," wrote about Bunin. "He was a great stylist who wrote
very suggestively. He didn't spray us with ideologies or worries. His writing
is pure poetry." Makine has also named Katherine Mansfield as his favorite
writer in English.

All
Makine's novels have been written in French but they were so good that publishers suspected a hoax of some kind. Makine played along, saying that the works were translations of his Russian originals and then they were published. Only with his third book, Once
Upon the River Love, did Makine abandon the deception. His next book, Dreams
of My Russian Summers (1995) won both of France's top literary
prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis, establishing Makine as one of
the most celebrated writers in Europe. Success enabled him to
acquire a home, a former lunatic asylum in Montmartre. "The poet
Gérard de Nerval was taken care of in my building. It was the only place
he felt really well. He found real happiness there."

Contemporary
French fiction is characterized by a language in constant analysis and
self-examination, what the French refer to it as nombrelisme
or navel-gazing. Makine contrasts this to his style, calling it
"external."

"Beauty
was the least of our preoccupations in the land where we were born,
Utkin, me, and the others. You could spend your whole life there and
never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, never seek out the
secrets of the mosaic of the human face or the sensual topography of the
human body."

"Love,
too, did not exactly take root in this austere country. Love, for
love's sake had, I think, simply been forgotten - had atrophied in the
bloodbath of the war, been garroted by the barbed-wire entanglements of
the nearby camp, frozen by the breath of the Arctic."

Its title accurately reflects the wistfulness
that suffuses Once Upon the River Love (Au Temps du Fleuve Amour).The river itself (Amur in Russian, Amour in French -- the pun in not
possible to replicate in English) is just an element of the
backdrop, although the Amur is one of the world's ten longest
rivers, like so much else about Siberia, it seems very far away.

It
is winter in eastern Siberia, the village is buried under snow up to the chimney
tops, an escaped prisoner has frozen to death in a tree, and the
brightest lights are the windows on the trans-Siberian express. Of
course, the train seems to thunder as it passes in the dark of a brutally cold
night.

The
residents of little Svetlaya are in no doubt that they live on the wrong side
of the Iron Curtain. With meager prospects for the future - the only jobs
around are in logging, mining, or guarding the local gulag - but they are
fascinated by the shreds of Western culture that come their way.

In
a nearby village the Red October Cinema is running a sort of film festival of
Jean-Paul Belmondo movies. That a
run-of-the-mill B-movie adventure could undermine official Soviet
propaganda extolling the crop yields on a collective farm more
effectively than lofty ideals of freedom and democracy is both charming and
sad. Three boys, Samurai, Utkin, who is disabled, and Mitya, make
repeated pilgrimages to the cinema, tramping through cold woods, so
enamored do they become with the French tough guy on the big screen.
Although they have no way of knowing it, each will eventually find his own way out of Siberia: Samurai to die in an unnamed Central American
liberation struggle, like Che Guevara, Utkin to write captions for
pornographic cartoons, and Mitya who gets the prize - a job in the movie industry. Makine's attraction to the French language is an idea with a history behind it. When Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, his novel about Russia during the time of Napoleon, two per cent of the novel (portions of dialogue) was written in French because the upper class characters in his story would have been ardent Francophiles. For them France represented the culture they found lacking in their own country. The romance continues to this day.

For further reading: Once Upon the River Love by Andrei Makine, translated from the Russian by Geoffrey Strachan, New York, Arcade Publishing: 1998.

22 February 2016

"Until the age of nine I had nothing—just one ancient dress. I went
hungry, ran around barefoot from April to October, even begged. We were a
family of “Enemies of the People.” That was what they called those who
had been accused of political crimes and sent to the camps. Three of my
relatives had been accused of spying for the Japanese, and were
executed. Later, my great-grandfather was assassinated in the middle of
Moscow, pushed under a car. I didn’t have toys and had only one crayon,
purple. I found a piece of cardboard and made a purple horse with a
purple eye. It seemed too skinny, so I wrapped a rag around its middle
and played with it. In the street, I always picked up bits of brick,
limestone, and charcoal, and drew on the pavement with those three
colors: red, white, and black."

- Ludmilla Petrushevskaya speaking with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, her comments translated from the Russian by Anna Summers

To appreciate the dark comedy of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's
novels and stories you don't have to get the humor embedded in the phrase 'Apocalypse
pretty soon', but it doesn't hurt. There is an old Russian saying that goes: "I wake up; it's a bad day." Petrushevskaya must know this well; her stories are often described as fairy tales but not by her fellow Muscovites who see her as the chronicler of their daily lives.

The girl Ludmilla who made a space for herself under a table in her demented uncle's apartment gave birth to the writer whose depictions of suffocating family life all but drives her characters crazy. The bleak living conditions in urban housing blocks, known as kommunalkas, have outlasted the Soviet regime that decreed the virtues that would result from communal living.

All too predictably, scarce material goods and lack of privacy led to the fierce possessiveness that could bring relatives to argue over "ownership" of an electric light switch. Anna, the protagonist of "The Time Is Night" (1982), has to eke out the resources to care for her grandchildren, while her grown children circle like vultures, ready to grab whatever they can. In a more recent story, "Chocolates With Liqueur" from 2002, reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "A Cask Of Amonttilado," a married couple is locked in a struggle to the death for possession of an apartment.

Petrushevskaya, who was born in Moscow in 1938, was widowed in her twenties, a young mother with a child to support. Soon she began writing and, although she had a few stories published during the next two decades, most were banned by the authorities. While her stories lay rejected in a desk drawer, Petrushevskaya staged them as plays at schools, factories, or anywhere there was an available room. When glasnost (thethaw) happened in 1988 and Immortal Love was published, Petrushevskaya was recognized as one of the finest living Russian writers.

"Love them,­ they'll torture you; don't love them, ­they'll leave you anyway."
What most deeply satisfies me in Petrushevskaya's writing is her refusal
of an unctuous, too easily ingratiating, attitude toward her readers. By this I mean that she does not direct our sympathies to one character but not others. Sometimes her characters behave operatically, their emotions matching the plot lines that life hands them. Does deprivation drive people crazy? Petrushevskaya reminds us that it can. Petrushevskaya the
philosopher of life as it comes, rather than as we would wish it to be. Like that other clear-eyed philosopher, Billie Holiday, who said: “You've got to have something to eat and a little love
in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to
behave.”

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Anna Summers, New York, Penguin Books: 2015.

15 February 2016

I can never quite decide how good a photographer Jean-Baptiste Leroux is; he always seems to choose the most photogenic locations. Grant him that it would be difficult to avoid the centuries-worth of dramatic chateaus and cathedrals that organize the French landscape into a visual history book. There is much drabness and poverty in the blighted banlieeus that surround French cities like circles of hell but Leroux doesn't go there. Outside France, he seeks out the beautiful and finds it in the back canals of Venice and the gardens of the Palais Royale at Casablanca. I don't want to make too much of this, as Leroux comes to his work with a special love of gardens and interest in biodiversity. Contemporary French artists seem less inclined to valorize ugliness than their American counterparts; maybe that's what two World Wars and a Hundred Years' War that lasted one hundred and seventeen years will do the collective psyche. In any case, it was an inspired choice that the Conservatoire des jardins et paysages (French Conservation of Gardens and Landscapes) made in awarding Leroux carte blanche to document the gardens of France. When I look at his photograph of frost on the asparagus at Versailles, I feel the bite of the cold.

11 February 2016

That crisply smart outfit the young woman wears in Marcel Gromaire's painting La voyageuse au bateau (1930) is about to become ubiquitous once again this spring, according to the fashion press.

La rayure bretonne, or the Breton striped shirt, originated in 1858 as the official uniform for enlisted men in the French navy. The colors blue and white were chosen as being nautical; sailors soon decided that the contrasting stripes would make it easier to spot a man who went overboard. Even today an authentic marinière(marine shirt) must conform to Naval specifications: the body of the shirt has twenty-one blue stripes, representing Napoleon's major victories, alternating with white stripes that are twice twice the size. To be precise, the blue stripes are ten millimeters wide and the white stripes measure twenty millimeters. And, for practical reasons, the sleeves arethree-quarter length, a style that would become known as 'bracelet-sleeves' when Coco Chanel introduced it to women's wear.

An ambitious young woman, Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971) having had some success as a hat-maker, opened a shop in the seaside resort town of Deauville in 1913 to sell her uniquely styled luxurious casual clothing to women of leisure. Impressed by the crisp style of the sailors stationed at Deauville, Chanel then introduced her own marine look to the Paris in a nautical collection in 1917.

Chanel invented the sportysophistication that has become the preferred style of modern women, exemplified by the Chanel suit, a wool jersey outfitconsisting of a cardigan jacket and
pleated skirt, paired with a belted pullover top. Her innovative use of jersey, a machine knit
fabricthat had been relegated to the manufacture of men's underwear and hosiery,or in sports clothes for
tennis, golf and swimming.Other designers disliked jersey, rejecting it as too difficult
to handle compared to woven fabrics. Chanel took advantage of wartime fabric shortages and, yes, being a woman, she recognized that women wanted simpler, more practical clothesand greater freedom of movement. Her reputation grew during the decades between the two world wars as French women moved into the labor force (in greater numbers than their American counterparts),taking the places left vacant by a generation of men killed in combat.

Clear as the history of the rayure bretonne is, there are always new pretenders hoping to claim the crown. When Jean Seberg
appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's film A bout de souffle Breathless (1960) wearing a marinière a new generation discovered Breton stripes, and Yves Saint
Laurent 'introduced' the shirtin his first haute couture collection .

Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971) was Chanel's contemporary, and a painter of French leisure, golf, tennis, fishing, swimming and sun bathing, even managing to combine two of them in Tennis devant la mer or Tennis by the sea (1928, Musee d'Art moderne de la vbille de Paris).

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins